One of the biggest disgraces in this country is the way that computing is taught - or rather, the way it is not taught. I know as a parent from years of interaction with the school system at various levels that what passes for computer teaching is in fact little more than rote learning of where the Open command is on the menu in Word and Excel. That is, instead of teaching pupils how to use computers as a generic tool to solve their particular problems, it becomes instead a dull exercise in committing to memory various ritual Microsoft sequences to achieve one specific task.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Once upon a time load/save was realised to be an anachronism, that it would be far better if people were able to simply select which document they wanted to work on - and have session versioning and edit history (undo/redo) subsumed. Thus the 'save' operation would cease to exist, as would the problem of forgetting to save one's work or accidentally overwriting previous versions.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately by the time they started introducing this idea the commercial needs for s/w to remain familiar to prospective purchasers outweighed ergonomics, and we're as stuck with load/open, save/as, close as with QWERTY.
We could have had open/close and new/copy.
@Crosbie - interesting, thanks.
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